But it really isn't. E.g., you can cut source CDs for the few people
who receive copies of your GPLed binaries and request source within
three years, charging them in advance for the cost of producing and
mailing them. If that's a "hassle", outsource it to one of the cut-rate
CD-burning houses such as Cheapbytes; I'm sure they'd appreciate the
business, and you'd bear neither expense nor hassle yourself.

> We got into this with Cygwin. We install Cygwin on some customer sites
> solely for some of the popular Unix CLI utilities our support people
> prefer. Other than that, we do not modify, compile with, or otherwise
> touch a thing. Referencing the current Cygwin source is not
> sufficient; the reasoning is the source may change and no longer match
> the packages we distributed.

Cygwin is a mixture of GNU GPL and MIT X11 licensing. For the GPLed
packages, if your distribution of it was non-commercial, you can meet
your source-access obligation by referring people to where you got the
software from. Otherwise, you have the above-referenced three-year
obligation, for which you may pass along all costs to those requesting
source.

Going by experience, the number of people actually willing to order a
source CD once you've clarifed that it's not on your dime is almost nil.
(I used to take care of this issue at a large Linux hardware firm that
maintained and distributed its own full version of Red Hat Linux. Care
to guess how many people requested source CD sets? One, over three
years. We sent them free, with our compliments.)

Woodford recently ran afoul of the GNU GPL (General Public License)
requirement that downstream distributors of GPL code are obligated to
provide source code to users in an easily accessible format.

This is of course doubly incorrect. (1) They aren't obliged
to provide source code at all, if their act of distribution was
noncommercial in nature. In that case, as noted, they can refer users
upstream. (2) The obligation isn't to provide it to all users, only
to those who've (lawfully) received your distributed code and then
request matching source. You need to keep the matching source around
anyway as a reference copy, and may pass along all your distribution
costs to those parties requesting copies. (3) The format need not be
"easily accessible", just on a "medium customarily used for software
interchange".

Although Woodford is in the process of complying with the FSF's (Free
Software Foundation) request, he's not completely happy with it.

And, you know, I'd love to see Warren Woodford try to survive in the
proprietary software industry. He wouldn't survive the first
contract-violation lawsuit -- and, given how much he whines about a
polite notification from FSF that he needs to start complying with the
software licence he consented to when he redistributed other people's
work, I'm sure his screaming about proprietary software licence
enforcement, which is orders of magnitude more complex and nasty, would
be most entertaining.

--
Cheers, Your eyes are weary from staring at the CRT. You feel
Rick Moen sleepy. Notice how restful it is to watch the cursor
rick at linuxmafia.com blink. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are
yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
-- end of forwarded message --